Letters

Pressac’s “proof.” Samuel Crowell's facts: Samuel Crowell’s extremely valuable work on the routine and legally required use of gas-tight doors with peepholes by the Germans for tens of thousands of air-raid shelters shows, once again, how totally devoid of any real evidence the Holocaust story is regarding the alleged use of Nazi gas chambers for mass murder.

For Jean-Claude Pressac the discovery of some gas-tight doors at Auschwitz condemned the Nazis. His 567-page book in large format with hundreds of SS construction drawings and photos was given rave reviews in 1989 by the NY Times and many other organizations for supposedly being the definitive answer to the Holocaust deniers. The use of one such door for a room which also contained 14 shower heads “constitutes the fundamental proof” according to Pressac. Samuel Crowell shows that Pressac’s “proof” amounts to nothing at all.

—Friedrich Paul Berg

No evidence, but a sound conjecture: You may remember my “Great Debate” about the Holocaust with Texas publisher Mitchell Jones several years ago. Jones made a major deal out of the air-tight door that locks from the outside on the alleged gas chamber (“Brausebad”) at Dachau. According to Jones, this door indicated it was 95% probable that the room in question was a gas chamber.

Although I had no evidence to prove it, I pointed out to Jones that the “Brausebad” might have been intended to do double-duty as a shower room and. when necessary, an air-raid shelter, with a gas-tight door to protect against possible gas attacks.

At that time the best I could do to support this conjecture with evidence was to cite references from literature about WWII to air-tight doors on various rooms in various sorts of structures built by the Germans, and to quote a bit of “eye-witness testimony” by a female Auschwitz survivor who told about being put into a “gas chamber” during an air raid and then, when the raid was over, being taken out of the “gas chamber” again.

So Crowell's newly discovered evidence about this is very interesting. Congratulations.

— Lou Rollins

Technically detailed and immensely intriguing: I am an academic historian…. I have some secondary research interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history, particularly the security and police organizations and operations of Nazi Germany….

I come, therefore, to your site with some better than passing familiarity with the primary sources and secondary literature on Nazi atrocities. While I do not agree with the historical accuracy (or, perhaps more accurately, the interpretation of historical evidence) of a great deal of the material I have found in the CODOH site, I found much which is both immaculately documented and extremely thought-provoking to someone who does research in the field.

I think that your site provides a useful advocacy of viewpoints and analysis which otherwise would go unnoticed. For example, the analysis of the diplomatic of the alleged Wannsee protocol [Johannes Peter Ney] is simply brilliant, and the discussion of the possibility of locations at Auschwitz-Birkenau often characterized as gas-chambers being bomb/gas shelters is technically detailed and immensely intriguing….

What I want to say is that despite my reservations about some of the material on your site, I think it provides a valuable contribution to a free and vigorous debate on an extremely important historical issue.

The author of this missive, his Ivy League university, and his primary academic interests have been deleted to protect the innocent. He routinely protect academics who write us at CODOHWeb, even when they do not ask us to do so. The reason is that, while we very much appreciate their interest in what we are doing, we suspect that any academic who writes us openly using his real name is politically too naive to be left on his own.

I'm beginning to change my mind about this. We may have to sacrifice a few academics to the thought police to make our point about the lack of intellectual freedom on American campuses, particularly with regard to Holocaust studies. Lenin wasn't wrong about everything. He said—I suppose it originated in peasant circles—that when you want to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.

Maybe the time is come to allow professors who contact CODOHWeb openly to risk the skillet. That Great Omelet-Maker in the sky may have uses for a few cracked professors that haven't dreamed of yet.